Share and enjoy:

Like this:

Google recently used their image recognition neural network, which has “learned” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photos, to determine what the machines would derive photos based on their recognition patterns.

They are indifferent to stinging bees and documentaries alike. But they especially don’t care about venomous snakes.

Which is particularly curious given that venomous snakes kill many people and other animals. So why don’t honey badgers care? Coevolution of course!

Danielle Drabeck, a University of Minnesota grad student, set out to study how honey badgers are resistant to venom. It turns out, in a mutation similar to mongoose, hedgehogs and pigs, allows the honey badgers to resist neurotoxins.

Read more about it (arms race coevolution, parallel evolution, neurotoxins, HOORAY!) over at Slate.

Share and enjoy:

Like this:

Whenever a sexist scientist makes a stupid comment, twitter goes crazy. I am not saying this isn’t a great thing (see “Girls with Toys”).

However, one thing to note, is although there is outrage whenever sexist comments are made towards women in STEM (or stupid shirts are worn) it still doesn’t help solve our ultimate problem.

What’s missing is a CHANGE in the number of women in faculty positions in STEM fields. We need to fix the leaky pipeline, and grabbing our pitchforks and taking to twitter might not be doing it. And while Tim Hunt’s comments deserve to have him run out of town (which he was), I’m not sure removing one sexist solves our problem.

Sarah Soper comments on how male faculty are resistant to take on female students, and the more prestigious the faculty, the fewer females you find in their lab. And how that may be one of the cracks causing a leak in the pipeline, especially as you move up the academic pyramid.

Oh and I lied. See below for some awesomely #distractinglysexy images.

I’m really glad that Curie managed to take a break from crying to discover radium and polonium.

It might seem like I was fixing a leak on the Large Hadron Collider, but I was just #distractinglysexy

I did an entire Liver Transplant without crying or falling in love. Heartless Vixen

How do my male colleagues publish anything when I show up dressed so revealing?

Share and enjoy:

Like this:

Sometimes scientific breakthroughs come to us in the strangest of ways. At Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers teamed up with physicians studying lung cancer to test the use of nanoparticles in treating lung cancer.

They followed the nanoparticles injected into mice, and one of their nanoparticles didn’t behave as expected at all.

“To our surprise, this particle accumulated almost exclusively in a specific structure of the kidney and stayed there until all of it had degraded” – Ryan Williams, Postdoctoral Fellow at Sloan Kettering and the studies first author.

But, this misbehaving particle has a promising future. For the most common form of kidney cancer, renal cell carcinoma (RCC), this nanoparticle could deliver treatment directly to the tumor, while not disturbing other organs. It could also enable new ways to treat chemotherapy-induced kidney failure.

Mesoscale nanoparticles visualized by scanning electron microscopy. The diameter of an average particle measures about 400 nanometers, which is about 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair. (from Sloan Kettering Article)